Providing Enhanced Functionality for Data Store Clients

Data stores are typically accessed using a clientserver paradigm wherein the client runs as part of an application process which is trying to access the data store. This paper presents the design and implementation of enhanced data store clients having the capability of caching data for reducing the latency for data accesses, encryption for providing confidentiality before sending data to the server, and compression for reducing the size of data sent to the server. We support multiple approaches for caching data as well as multiple different types of caches. We also present a Universal Data Store Manager (UDSM) which allows an application to access multiple different data stores and provides a common interface to each data store. The UDSM provides both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces to each data store that it supports. An asynchronous interface allows an application program to access a data store and continue execution before receiving a response from the data store. The UDSM also can monitor the performance of different data stores. A workload generator allows users to easily determine and compare the performance of different data stores. The paper examines the key design issues in developing both the enhanced data store clients and the UDSM. It also looks at important issues in implementing client-side caching. The enhanced data store clients and UDSM are used to determine the performance of different data stores and to quantify the performance gains that can be achieved via caching.